Tag Archives: Blue Plaques

Marylebone is not lacking in blue plaques recording the former residences of the great – and not-so-great – local residents. Several examples have been the subject of previous blog posts. The official plaques were erected formally first by the London County Council / Greater London Council and are currently administered by English Heritage.

English Heritage’s selection criteria include a minimum time frame of 22 years between the subject’s death and an erection of a commemorative plaque. December 2016 saw an unofficial blue plaque erected to Joe Strummer of influential punk band The Clash. Strummer died in 2002 and thus fails the formal selection criteria. Nonetheless, a ceremony was held at the Seymour Housing Co-op building (33 Daventry Street NW1, between Lisson Grove and Edgware Road). In nearby Bell Street, Malcolm McLaren and two of the Sex Pistols were also residents in this period. This is the second public commemoration to Joe Strummer in the area. The pedestrian subway linking the two halves of Edgware Road, bisected by Harrow Road, is named the Joe Strummer Subway. Fittingly above this junction and subway soars the elevated Westway, an major inspiration for the band.

Joe Strummer has also made it into the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log in with your library card). Other resources one can use for research into his life and the band’s significance in music history are the several newspaper and magazine archives which can also be accessed free online with a Westminster Libraries membership. Those readers who were around in the late 1970s will remember the moral panic that bands such as The Clash and the Sex Pistols generated and this is reflected in many newspaper articles. I found an interesting slant upon the punk rock phenomenon in an Economist article entitled More money than music in nihilism, (June 11, 1977, page 22).

Away from these contemporary reports Westminster Libraries hold a number of books relating to The Clash and the punk rock phenomenon:

All of us who live or work in Westminster have walked through Trafalgar Square dozens of times, but how many of us have actually looked at Nelson’s Column properly? Certainly not me until recently when I happened to look at the bas-reliefs at the base of the pillar and wondered what they actually represented. Coincidentally on the bus home I heard a trailer for an excellent-sounding radio programme, Britain’s Black Past which mentioned the reliefs and revealed that at least one of the sailors pictured was black. A bit of research revealed that a third of the crew of the Victory, Nelson’s ship, were born outside Britain (including, somewhat surprisingly, three Frenchmen) and that one of the men pictured, George Ryan, was black.

As we celebrate Black History Month, what other memorials of interest can we find in Westminster?

Well, for a start there’s the oldest monument in London – Cleopatra’s Needle. Nothing to do with Cleopatra, it actually predates her by 1500 years, being made for Pharoah Thotmes III. One slightly odd feature of the Needle is that the four sphinxes, ostensibly there to guard it, actually face inwards so you’d think they’d be fairly easy to surprise…

Moving forward to the eighteenth century brings us to Ignatius Sancho(1724-1780) who, despite pretty much the worst possible start in life (he was born on slave ship and both his parents died soon after) became butler to the Duke of Montagu and, after securing his freedom, was the only eighteenth-century Afro-Briton known to have voted in a general election (in Westminster). He wrote many letters to the literary figures of the time such as the actor David Garrick and the writer Laurence Sterne, was painted by Thomas Gainsborough and was also a prolific composer.

And if you happen to be passing the Foreign and Commonweath Office, see if you can spot the memorial to him.

A more famous near-contemporary of Sancho, was Olaudah Equiano (1747-1797), another former slave and author of one of the earliest autobiographies by a black Briton.

Like George Ryan, Equiano (or Gustavus Vassa as he was known in his lifetime) was a sailor who travelled to the Caribbean, South America and the Arctic, having been kidnapped from Africa as a child. While still a slave, Equiano converted to Christianity and was baptised in St Margaret’s Westminster. His autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was one of the first slave narratives and was reprinted several times in Equiano’s lifetime. He became a leading member of the abolitionist movement, as one of the Sons of Africa, a group of former slaves in London who campaigned against slavery. You can see a plaque to him at 73 Riding House Street, Paddington and see him portrayed by Youssoo N’Dour in the film Amazing Grace.

One black Briton who needs almost no introduction is Mary Seacole (1805-1881), who fought racial prejudice to nurse and feed soldiers in the Crimea and who was so popular with her former patients that the Times reported on 26th April 1856 that, at a public banquet at the Royal Surrey Gardens:

“Among the illustrious visitors was Mrs Seacole whose appearance awakened the most raputurous enthusiasm. The soldiers not only cheered her but chaired her around the gardens and she really might have suffocated from the oppressive attentions of her admirers were it not that two sergeants of extraordinary stature gallantly undertook to protect her from the pressures of the crowd.”

You can follow the famous war correspondent WH Russell in the Times Digital Archive (log in with your library card number) – he was a great admirer of Mrs Seacole. And if you haven’t already, do read her extraordinary autobiography The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. There are two plaques in her honour in Westminster – one at 147 George Street and one at 14 Soho Square.

Less well-known than Mary Seacole is Henry Sylvester Williams (1869-1911), a Trinidadian teacher who came to London in the 1890s, studied Latin at King’s College and qualified as a barrister in 1897 (though he earned his living as a lecturer for the Temperance Association). He was a founder-member of the Pan-African Association, whose aims were

“to secure civil and political rights for Africans and their descendants throughout the world; to encourage African peoples everywhere in educational, industrial and commercial enterprise; to ameliorate the condition of the oppressed Negro in Africa, America, the British Empire, and other parts of the world”

In 1906, Williams was elected as a Progressive for Marylebone Council and, along with John Archer in Battersea, was one of the first black people elected to public office in Britain. You can read more about Williams (and the other people listed here) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and see a plaque erected by Westminster Council in his honour at 38 Church Street.

Bringing us nearer the present day are two former residents of Westminster who everyone knows. Guitarist Jimi Hendrix, discussed before in this blog, lived for a short time in 1968 at 23 Brook Street, Mayfair, and you can see a blue plaque to him there.

And we finish on perhaps the most famous memorial of recent years – in 2007 a bronze statue of Nelson Mandela was erected in Parliament Square in the presence of Mr Mandela himself.

Commuters reading the London Evening News on Christmas Eve 1925 would have seen a new children’s story called ‘The Wrong Sort of Bees’, featuring the first appearance of a honey-loving bear. What the readers wouldn’t have known is that this wasn’t the last they would hear of this particular bear. Ten months later, on 14 October 1924, Winnie-the-Pooh was published and everyone’s favourite bear appeared between hard covers for the first time.

Pooh’s creator, AA (Alan Alexander) Milne (1882-1956) grew up in Kilburn, where his father ran Henley House school. The school boasted HG Wells as one of its teachers and for a time Wells did teach the young Milne. He then went onto Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge where he made the right contacts and was able to get a job working on Punch. As well as writing comic essays and sketches he found success as a a novelist and as a playwright (The Dover Road was recently revived at Jermyn Street Theatre) but it was as a writer for children that he found lasting fame.

In 1921 Milne bought a teddy bear at Harrods for his baby son Christopher Robin which was soon named after Winnipeg, a Canadian bear in London Zoo. Winnipeg was a female bear which presumably accounts for the nickname Winnie. Young Christopher’s toys also included a donkey, a kangaroo and a piglet and later a tiger (but no owl). These toys, along with Christopher Robin himself found themselves appearing in Milne’s stories. The initial 1925 publication in the London Evening News was followed in 1926 by Winnie-the-Pooh, with The House at Pooh Corner following in 1928.

The books were instant successes. Christopher Milne found himself a rather unwilling celebrity and the subject of much teasing at school. Eventually he left London and spent many happy years running a bookshop in Dartmouth, Devon.

For many of us, our enjoyment of the stories owes as much to the charming pictures as to the text. And these were drawn by another Londoner – EH (Ernest Howard) Shepard (1879-1976), who spent much of his life in St John’s Wood. He was born at 55 Springfield Road and in the 1930s lived in a splendid house in Melina Place with his son Graeme, whose own bear Growler was the model for Shepard’s drawings of Pooh. Shepard, of course, also drew the most famous set of illustrations for The Wind in the Willows (which AA Milne dramatised as Toad of Toad Hall) and he wrote a charming memoir of his St John’s Wood childhood called Drawn from Memory. This includes his memories of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee and the famous 1887 fire that completely destroyed Whiteley’s department store (then in Westbourne Grove) which could be seen from Highgate Hill. You can see a plaque to EH Shepard at another of his Westminster homes – 10 Kent Terrace, Regents Park.

And of course, you’ll find plenty of Disney DVDs in our children’s libraries though you’ll have to try to ignore the American accents and the incongruous Gopher – we all know the real Pooh was a true Londoner!

[Nicky]

Post script: Catherine Cooke of the Sherlock Holmes Collection has paid several visits to Pooh and friends in their New York home, and sent these great pictures to share:

With over nine thousand plaques mounted on buildings scattered throughout the capital, the London Blue Plaques scheme is well known. In some streets of central London, almost all the buildings display a plaque, or even more than one. What you may not be aware of is that the interesting scheme celebrates its 150th anniversary this year. Here’s a short history:

William Ewart, a Liberal MP, suggested that the government should start this scheme to honour significant London residents in 1863. The idea was rejected due to cost, but three years later in 1866 the Society of Arts (later the Royal Society of Arts) took the scheme on.

The first two plaques were erected in 1867. The first commemorated the poet Lord Byron at his birthplace, 24 Holles Street off Cavendish Square, but was later destroyed with the demolition of the house. The second plaque in Kings Street, St James was erected to the exiled French emperor Napoleon III London residence. This has survived.

William Ewart is in the select group who are commemorated with more than one plaque. English Heritage, the current custodians of the scheme, now restrict the scheme to a single plaque per person however many addresses that individual had. William Ewart is commemorated in central London but also his former house which is now Hampton Public Library in south west London (see picture above). This is a particularly fitting commemoration as, whilst an MP, William Ewart introduced a bill that became Britain’s first Public Library Act setting up a network of free public libraries..

I think it is fair to say that for many years this scheme has favoured establishment figures and there has been a definite bias towards males. Currently only 13% of the total commemorate women. Recognising this, English Heritage is making concerted efforts to get proposals from the public for female candidates.
Westminster is home to plaques for several ‘non-establishment’ figures, including Crimean war nurse Mary Seacole and, unusually, one commemorating an event rather than a person: The Cato Street Conspiracy, which was a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister and Cabinet in 1820.

Spurred on by spotting Charles Babbage’s (1791–1871) Green Plaque on a building at 1a Dorset Street, Marylebone, I began to investigate the life of this computing pioneer, who began working on the idea of inventing automatic calculating machines at this address from the 1830s. This work followed his invention of a ‘difference engine’, a fixed-function calculator which used existing mathematical formulae to calculate an answer.

In contrast, the analytical engine was designed to calculate virtually any mathematical function using programmable numerical data, in any sequence, to find the answer. It would have been programmed by using punched cards, a technique used by loom operators at that time to control the patterns of the woven thread.

Punched holes on cards remained as the means for programming computers in many of the IBM and other early 20th century computers. In fact, immediately before the rise of the personal computer, I remember using hole punched cards denoting chosen subject terms as a means of searching for article references.

Babbage’s use of punched cards is important as it would enabled the operator to repeat the same sequence of operations and also choose alternative actions depending on the value of a result. A landmark in Babbage’s continuous development of his design came with a significant change of the machine’s internal organisation. He separated the stored numbers (data) from the section which processed it, thus laying the foundation for modern computers’ storing data together with a processor to manipulate this data.

Unfortunately Babbage never persuaded the British government or private investors to finance the construction of his machines. Luckily his notes and plans together with his correspondence with Westminster’s next computer pioneer have meant that physical reconstructions are possible. You can see examples of reconstructions at London’s Science Museum.

Babbage’s great supporter and an important contributor to his work was Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace (1815–1852), the daughter of Lord Byron. Her residence, 12 St James’s Square SW1, displays an English Heritage Blue Plaque celebrating this contribution to computing history.

Lovelace is credited with understanding Babbage’s machine perhaps even better than he did himself, and with devising the first complex computer programme. In a letter to Babbage dated 10 July 1843, she suggests

“I want to put in something about Bernoulli’s Number, in one of my notes, as an example of how an explicit function may be worked out by the engine, without having been worked out by human head and hands first”.

She is posthumously celebrated for this achievement with a modern programming language named after her: Ada. Without the contribution of both parties the design of the analytical machine would not evolved as one of the first programmable computers. In this partnership Babbage was the engineer and Lovelace the programmer and visionary who saw its potential.

The final pioneer, Alan Turing had a much more tenuous link with the borough, being born in Westminster at Warrington Lodge, 2 Warrington Avenue, Maida Vale before being ‘shipped out’ aged one to the to the care of relations when his parents left for several years in India. However fleeting this connection he is also recognised with an English Heritage Blue Plaque on this house.

Posthumously famous for his WW2 code breaking efforts at Bletchley Park, about which we have written before, Alan Turing is also widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computing with his design of the Turing machine in the 1930s and his postwar research.

Alan Turing’s work and life is also the subject of the recent feature film ‘The Imitation Game‘.

With pleasing symmetry there is a link between Turing and Lovelace. In the 1930s, whilst working on artificial intelligence and computing, Alan Turing rediscovered her notes on programming and this had a significant influence on his research.

Further biographical details for all three pioneers can also be found using the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (log in to all of these subscription sites for free with your library membership card). It’s worth looking to the newspaper archives for further insight too – I found several further references to Charles Babbage in The Times Digital Archive as the newspaper published several of his letters relating to various scientific topics. He also wrote to the Illustrated London News describing, with illustrations, a devise which is similar to an early example of a periscope. This was designed for artillery troops to safely line up guns from beneath a parapet. (ILN Saturday, August 18, 1855; pg. 210; Issue 757).

More information about these pioneers and the wider history of computing can be obtained from two further 24/7 reference resources. Credo Referenceand Oxford Digital Reference Shelf are both searchable resources which use a number of dictionaries, textbooks and encyclopedias as source material. Just type in the relevant search term, eg: Ada Lovelace, to display a number of links to original text relating to this search.

Returning to print, on the shelves of Marylebone Information Service is an useful guide to computing history: A Brief History of Computing by Gerard O’Regan.
The book begins with early civilizations such as the Babylonians and Egyptians, who developed mathematics, geometry and astronomy using methods such as a counting board (an early form of abacus) and algebra to make theoretical calculations, and leads right through to modern computer programming and the internet revolution.

And the computer revolution goes on. Will the next pioneer come from one of our Code Clubs for kids? There are currently regular clubs meeting atCharing Cross, Church Street, Maida Vale and St John’s Wood libraries, but more are planned – ask in your library for details.

Recently I noticed the name plaque “Copperfield House” erected on a building at the junction of Beaumont Street with Marylebone High Street. It was named after the Dickens character David Copperfield which was one of six novels written between 1839-51 at the house 1 Devonshire Terrace, situated a few hundred meters away:

Despite protests, this house situated on the south side of Marylebone Road was demolished in the late 1950s to make way for an office block, Ferguson House. To get some idea what this house’s interior might have looked like, why not visit the house he occupied in Doughty Street WC1?

The Dickens household moved to Tavistock Square in 1851 with the ending of the Devonshire Terrace lease. 1851 was a traumatic year for Dickens – it included the death of his father, his wife’s illness and the death of their youngest daughter Dora in April, so it was not surprising that he did not renew the lease. The rate book entry includes the hand written comment “house empty from November 1851”.

Conveniently this year coincided with a national Census, so I visited Westminster Archives to consult the microfilmed Census enumerator returns for a snapshot of the household. To my surprise the Devonshire Terrace household on Census night only consisted of the Dickens children, who had been left in the care of a cook, a nursery maid and also a wet nurse for seven month old Dora. Where were the parents? Using Ancestry and Find My Past I found them. On Census night Charles Dickens is listed as a visitor at an address in Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, attending to his dying father. His wife Catherine, suffering from a nervous condition, was at Malvern taking the water cure. She was in Malvern when her daughter died two weeks later.

It is worth braving the Marylebone Road traffic fumes to visit Ferguson House at number 15 for the unexpected sight of a huge panel sculpted by Estcourt J Clack (1906-1973) commemorating some of the characters Dickens created while resident Devonshire Terrace – including David Copperfield.

Dickens’ father John was born in Marylebone and had been baptised at the previous Marylebone Church, situated immediately to the south of the current church. Dickens also had a number of relations on his mother’s side who lived in the Marylebone and Oxford Street area. Thus it is not surprising that when his parents first moved to London from Portsmouth in 1814 (when Dickens was two), they lodged in the Marylebone/Fitzrovia area at 10 Norfolk Street (now 22 Cleveland Street W1). Although the family initially resided here for two years, Dickens returned to the same house in 1829. He gave this address as his residence when he applied for a reader’s ticket at the British Museum in 1830.

North of this house, the St. Marylebone and St. Pancras parish boundary ran north south following the line of an ancient track Green Lane which with urbanisation became Cleveland Street. At the junction with Tottenham Street the boundary veered off south east thus incorporated Dickens’ house within St. Marylebone. A subsequent amendment of administrative boundaries has meant that the Camden and Westminster boundary now continues along the line of Cleveland Street south towards Goodge Street so that this house now falls within Camden.

The former boundary is graphically illustrated by this image of a 19th century St Pancras parish marker placed on the side wall of a house on Tottenham Street. Note the “plaque wall” continues as the back wall of number 10 Norfolk Street. The blank wall meeting it at right angles on the right of the image is actually the side of Dickens’ former residence.

A good description of the Norfolk Street area and local observed influences upon his works e.g. the Cleveland Street workhouse, are highlighted in a recent book Dickens and the workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London poor by Ruth Richardson. The book also includes several recent photographs of the house interior which has not been greatly altered since.

The author describes how she identified the house from using a number of sources including maps and rate books held at Westminster Archives (see a previous blog on this work). Note that there has been some controversy over the author’s claim that the house location was unknown. Several people have pointed out that it was accurately located in several previous Dickens’ studies. What is not in doubt is that the book and controversy has resulted in the house being recognised by the Dickens Fellowship who has now erected a blue wall plaque on the house front. The book also describes the successful preservation campaign to save from demolition the adjacent Cleveland Street Workhouse building, the probable inspiration for Oliver Twist.

Ruth Richardson also found several local names that are linked with characters. For example Bill Sykes and Sam Weller have their real life name counterparts in two local shop keepers. William Sykes was an oil lamp oil seller and also within this street was a shoe seller Dan Weller. These links were highlighted in a Guardian interview with Dalya Alberge dated Thursday 2 February 2012. This can be read using the 24/7 newspaper resource NewsBank (log in with your library card number).

Charles Dickens is not the only major Victorian novelist with Marylebone roots. His great friend the novelist Wilkie Collins was born and lived much of his life in the Marylebone area. There is a recently erected Westminster green plaque to mark the site of his birth on the block of flats at 96-100 New Cavendish Street.

Finally, an exciting Dickens discovery was announced in July 2015 by The Independent. Dickens was editor of a journal “All the Year Round”. A researcher, after purchasing bound volumes of this journal, found that these were Dickens’ own copies and they had a number of handwritten annotations identifying the anonymous contributors to the journal who included major authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins and Lewis Carroll! You can read more about this discovery on Library Press Display or NewsBank(log in with your library card).

Westminster Archives‘ resources range from parish records to local maps, but why not come and take a look at one of the less frequently utilised resources – our collection of newspaper cuttings? Although we hold local newspapers in our collection, the newspaper cuttings collected and collated over the years are a quick and easy way to discover historic events, changes to streets and the ongoing history of buildings in an area. Perhaps there is a historic event that you remember which is detailed in our collection?

Open Garden Squares is coming up this weekend (13-14 June) so I took a look at some of the newspaper cuttings for those in our area: Bryanston Square, Montagu Square, Belgrave Square and Eaton Square. Below are some of the articles I found – just a few of the fascinating historic articles on the garden squares of the City of Westminster.

Bryanston Square

This drinking fountain pictured above was erected at the south end of Bryanston Square in 1863, paying tribute to William Pitt Byrne (1806-1861). Byrne was the editor of the Morning Post. The fountain still exists and is now a Grade II listed monument. Unfortunately, during the years following its construction it was allowed to run dry. The Evening Standard noted this in 1974:

Montagu Square

Quirky tales can often be found in our cuttings. Here is Yoko Ono in 1990 reliving her time at Montagu Square, where she shared a flat with John Lennon.

In 1982 the members of the Montagu Square Garden Trust observed resident Reginald Heaney’s 70th birthday with a watercolour of the square and garden. If you couldn’t be outside to enjoy the garden, looking at a lovely painting instead might do.

Belgrave Sqaure

In 1979 the annual ‘extravaganza’ at Belgrave Square took place; a fair with top fashion designers, music and even a relay jog. The main event, the traditional Belgrave Beano, was an exuberant evening event where socialising amid dancing, food and drink was a highlight of the year.

Look out for signed architecture on the houses alongside the 4.5 acre garden at Belgrave Square. An article in the Times (1973) gave instructions on locating the Victorian architects who were proud enough of their work to inscribe their names in various places on the buildings. Can you spot George Basevi Junior’s name or Philip Hardwick’s?

Eaton Square

Neville Chamberlain, who was prime minister from 1869-1940, and actress Vivien Leigh were each given a blue plaque at Eaton Square. Vivien Leigh lived at number 54 Eaton Square from 1913 to 1967 whilst Chamberlain occupied number 37 from 1923-1935. Both these famous past residences of Eaton Square and their new plaques were awarded note in our newspaper cuttings.

During the post war years, a time when Vivien Leigh was a resident of Eaton Square, the garden would have looked like this:

Our newspaper cuttings can be searched with a visit to our Archives Search Room. Visit our periodicals website, WULOP, to see a list of the local newspapers we hold in our collection.

Interested in other outdoor areas of London? Quiet London by Siobhan Wall gives an excellent guide to the less frequently trodden areas of London, including some captivating hidden gardens, most of which are open throughout the year.